Someone Figured Out Each State’s Favorite Bad Movie

Tastes in movies are regional just like food. In the same way that people in the Midwest like their barbecue sauce sweet and the Carolinas like theirs with vinegar, some movies are more popular in different areas of the country. The love for particular bad movies, for example, can be very specific and localized.

Over at Century Link you can see an infographic that breaks down each of the 50 states’ (and D.C.’s) guiltiest pleasure. Apparently my home state of New York is big for The Room. My wife’s family is from Rhode Island, where apparently they can’t get enough of Halle Berry’s Catwoman. My high school buddy who moved to Florida lives in Super Mario Bros. country. And in certain areas of the West, they really do like Wild Wild West, the notorious Will Smith flop. Beloved Bat-tastrophe Batman and Robin tops the list in an interesting hodgepodge of states; Delaware, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah.

I’m fascinated by these results, but I’m curious about the methodology. According to this site, they “compiled a list of the most popular, lowest-scoring movies of all time using data from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and the Razzie Awards,” then “analyzed the Google Trends data for each movie to determine which guilty pleasure is most popular in each state.” They found the most popular bad movie is The Emoji Movie, cited in nine different states and the District of Columbia, and I have a very hard time comprehending that being even one person’s favorite bad movie, much less thousands upon thousands of people in one out of every five states in this great nation. That just seems impossible.

I still like this idea, though, and I’m fascinated by the larger idea of regional cinematic favorites. We definitely need more research in this area. I just wonder if another exploration of this would have found different results.